The Media’s Risky Love Affair With Leaks

In January, BuzzFeed News published a dossier full of sensational and unverified claims compiled by a former British intelligence agent,which described extensive connections between President Trump and the Russian government. Trump responded, as expected, with a tweet. He placed one particular word in suggestive, dismissive quotes: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public.” Setting aside the dossier’s contents, Trump understood that its status in the public eye depended in part on what it was called. Seen as a piece of opposition research, or a political prop, or a plant, the dossier loses some power. Seen as a leak, however, the dossier seems more likely to be true.

In politics, the word “leak” conjures whistle-blowing and heroism or villainy and subterfuge, depending on whom you ask and his position relative to the breach. In either case, a leak promises new information, unadulterated and straight from the source. It packs a significant narrative payload: Someone wanted something hidden, but someone else wanted it out, and now it’s here.

A political culture defined by mutual disbelief grinds discourse to a halt. It casts all declarations of truth as mere invitations for denial. Presentations of evidence summon “alternative facts.” Reasonable policies begin to resemble nefarious schemes. The use of any authoritative language becomes an incriminating act itself. Now any claim can be rendered inert with a simple question: Says who? Here, leaks have tremendous rhetorical value, and they offer a uniquely persuasive answer: someone who didn’t mean to say anything at all.

By virtue of their unvarnished nature, leaks have evolved into the realest of facts. This epistemological status has been fortified in recent years with a series of spectacular leaks that successfully reframed official narratives as grand fictions. Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about America’s astonishingly robust surveillance apparatus were consciousness-altering, even to those who would reflexively condemn him. The leak was archetypal: It earned him both notoriety as a historic whistle-blower and a life in exile. The documents flowed in the expected direction, from the deepest chambers of power to the public, with an assist from journalists. It helped that his disclosures were voluminous but easy to summarize — “the government is spying on you” — and exceeded the highest reasonable expectations of what leaks from the National Security Agency might actually contain.

The Panama Papers arrived in a similarly affirming — and cinematic — fashion. The 2016 leak of more than 11 million documents from Mossack Fonseca implicated the Central American firm and its clients in high-dollar tax-avoidance and money-stashing schemes. The leaks produced real results, initiating thousands of investigations in dozens of countries, and rocked governments, even leading to the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister. But to people remote from these consequences, including most American readers, whose government and business leaders largely escaped the controversy, the fact of the leak very likely overshadows the specifics of its contents. Everyone already knows that the international superrich play by different rules; catching them in action made for thrilling comeuppance.

These leaks were hardly apolitical, but their significance was not defined primarily by partisan politics. Subsequent major leaks last year produced more ambivalent responses. The first defining one of the 2016 election targeted the Democratic National Committee. Thousands of emails — possibly obtained through a Russian-sponsored hacking scheme — made plain the party leadership’s poorly concealed preference for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and led to a series of resignations that included the party’s chairwoman. They confirmed widely held suspicions about how the primaries unfolded but were less shocking than humiliating evidence of Democratic bumbling — as memorable for their mere occurrence as for what they contained.

What happened next eclipsed the D.N.C. leak: the publication of thousands of emails sent by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. Their contents were disseminated into a comprehensively partisan environment, and the fact of the emails’ existence immediately overwhelmed their contents. In the absence of a single disqualifying revelation to focus on — the emails contained an enormous amount of material of interest, but in retrospect, less of obvious importance — the conversation around the emails became a battle over what they really were and the significance of how they came to be.

Now imagine that John Podesta’s emails had been published voluntarily, as some sort of act of pre-emptive extreme transparency. Would they have been received as scandalous, revealing, unflattering and damaging? Yes, clearly. But would they have lodged themselves in the electorate’s consciousness as broad proof of boundless corruption and media collusion? Would they have inspired, for example, a gunman to “self-investigate” a theorized child-sex-trafficking operation based in a Washington pizza parlor, driven by a belief in a food-based code of communication invented in a frenzy of crazed epiphany? Almost certainly not.

An unauthorized glimpse is always more interesting than sanctioned transparency, and accordingly, it is always expected to be. Indeed, the damaging effect of the Podesta leaks proved far greater than the sum of the stories they produced. This dynamic seems to have been obvious to WikiLeaks, which released the emails in batches, like some sort of pulp drama, and was intuitive to Trump, who referred to the leaks frequently but often in the abstract, shrouding them in the toxic rhetorical fog of “the emails.” It was also instinctively obvious to Democrats playing defense, who took pains to point out that Podesta and the D.N.C. were actually “hacked.”

Leaks are most often an outsider’s tool, and they look different from a vantage of power. As a candidate, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks frequently and approvingly at rallies, in interviews and in two out of three presidential debates. As president-elect, Trump responded to news of Barack Obama’s offer of clemency to Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks’s first major source, by calling her a “TRAITOR” on Twitter. Now that Trump is president, his public flirtation with leaks has given way to his deeper and longer-held instincts for secrecy — his early presidency, like his campaign, has used sweeping nondisclosure agreements to an unusual degree.

The media’s relationship to leaks is, likewise, under construction. For example, the defense offered by BuzzFeed for its choice to publish made an appeal to the public’s right to know: The dossier was being discussed and shared at the highest levels of government and was in the hands of journalists, and the public had already been made aware of its existence. Who was BuzzFeed, in other words, to get in the way?

This defense rankled some journalists. Prominent figures in media, including the executive editor of The Times, said they wouldn’t have made the same decision, emphasizing the uncorroborated claims it contained. But in the weeks following the election, Twitter was flooded with entreaties from reporters, who begged federal employees to leak them stories. Old media and new rushed to create or fortify high-tech, encrypted channels for leaking documents and tips, embracing the sorts of tools and technologies previously associated with activists, dissidents and hackers. The calls signaled a willingness to serve as conduits for information, and a budding awareness that, in some circumstances, a story’s status as a leak is more persuasive than the imprimatur of its publisher. They promised safety above impact or reach; they offered assistance, not access to their audiences. These calls provide clues as to what a media reverse-engineered around motivated leakers could offer: context, explanation, meaning and narrative.

Early coverage of the Trump administration has been defined by seemingly panoptical accounts from within the White House, together composing a bizarre but credible portrayal of an executive branch as it has taken shape, spasmed and questioned the limits of its power. Its walls appear to be totally perforated. But these are small leaks — in many cases, anonymous quotes. A government in the midst of a shocking ideological transition is bound to spring bigger ones.

The dangers presented by leaks are clearly not lost on the Trump administration, but neither are the opportunities. The White House will be beset by leaks; it can also be expected to use them, to adopt their powerful language and to exploit the particular hazards — ethical, operational and legal — that they present to a press going through rapid structural change. Experienced as the exception, leaks promise a rare glimpse of unfiltered, unauthorized truth. As the rule, uncertainty will prevail. Politics documented by leaks and politics enacted through leaks are two very different things — and from the outside, the second is indistinguishable from the first.

A romantic notion of the leak imagines that it operates according to something like a law of physics, allowing secrets to flow from where they’ve become too abundant, and powerful, to where they’ve become too scarce. But in reality, anyone can call anything a leak, and we should expect that they will.

John Herrman is a David Carr fellow at The New York Times.

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